Last Sunday night I talked to you about
Jesus and the great multitude that surrounded him,
and I tried to tell you why he
was among them.
Tonight I have another text from the same
chapter altogether that follows hard on his miracle
of the loaves and the fishes, and this
one is altogether different.
This one says, when Jesus therefore perceived that
they would come and take him by force
to make him a king, he departed again
into a mountain himself alone.
Himself alone.
In verse 15.
In verse 1, or rather 2, a great
multitude did follow him.
Now, himself alone.
I want to talk to you tonight about
Jesus, about why Jesus went into a mountain.
Now, in the first place, Jesus did depart
into this mountain himself alone.
It is easy to establish from the New
Testament that this was a practice of our
Lord, and not an unusual occurrence at all.
His first 40 days, you'll remember, that when
he went into the wilderness there that time,
for 40 long days, he was alone in
the wilderness.
Himself alone.
In Luke 6.12 it tells us that
he went up into a mountain and continued
all night in prayer to God.
Matthew 14.23 says, he sent the multitude
away and departed and went up into a
mountain apart.
And then that famous passage in Matthew 26
.39 where it says that he told his
disciples to come near and stay with him.
Then he said, now you stay here and
pray.
And he went a little further.
Now, those verses I have given you establish
the truth, if it needed to be established.
And our Lord had the habit of every
once in a while departing from the multitude
and going somewhere by himself into a desert,
up into a mountain, or up under the
trees in the olive yard, anywhere where he
could be by himself.
This was not only true of our Lord
Jesus Christ, but true also of the worthy
saints.
I was thinking as I rode along on
the train about this, and I was thinking
about that man Enoch.
Now, no doubt Enoch was a married man.
He was a married man, a man of
family.
He left at least one son behind him.
He no doubt had to make a living
of some sort.
He didn't live merely on spirituality.
He had to eat and play to keep
his family.
And yet we don't learn very much about
his family at all.
When he took a walk, it was with
God.
Enoch walked with God.
You get a sense of loneliness there, a
sense of being himself alone with God.
And then there was Noah.
Now, of course, the earth was full of
people in that day, and Noah had his
wife and his sons and the rest of
them there.
But when you read about Noah, you have
a sense that you're reading about one man
alone.
His walk with God separated him so that
he was more or less alone.
And there was Abraham.
It came to pass that God said unto
Abraham, Get thee out of thy country and
out from thy kindred and unto a land
that I will show thee.
Abraham must have been by himself at that
time.
I surely think he was.
I doubt whether God had touched Abraham on
the shoulder during a card party or even
a coffee clutch.
I think that Abraham was by himself, and
unquestionably he was by himself cultivating his soul.
Then there was Jacob.
Twice Jacob had experiences.
There was that first wonderful experience there in
the backside of the desert, in the waste
-howling wilderness, when God appeared to the man.
There was that second experience by the riverside
when God appeared to him again.
And both of those times, he was all
together by himself.
And I have read tonight in your hearing
the story of Moses on the mount, one
time that he was on the mount.
Before that, Moses had knelt in rapture beside
the burning bush, alone himself.
Take this man Job.
You read the book of Job and you
will learn from it that Job had a
habit of being with God alone.
Elijah came down from the hillsides and mountains
of Tishbi and stood before the king.
He said, I stand before God.
Those were the only credentials he carried, that
he stood before Jehovah.
And it was in loneliness that Elijah learned
his great lesson.
And the prophets, you will read about them
and how they were alone with God.
David's psalms are psalms of loneliness.
They're also psalms of fine, sweet, social joy.
But those times of social joys were interspersed
by times of loneliness when he and God
were alone.
Now let us inquire why our Lord Jesus
Christ departed into a mountain himself alone, and
why he was not singular in this, but
it was the practice of all the Bible
worthies.
Let us inquire why.
Why did these persons withdraw themselves from human
society for periods of time ranging anywhere from
a few hours to many days, and there
wait alone in the presence of God?
Now to get at that and get an
answer to it, we're going to have to
go into the very root and rationality of
salvation.
You follow along and bear with me while
I try to tell you why Jesus went
by himself alone.
It dates back and goes back to the
whole philosophy of God and man and human
society.
I'm going to talk quite a little tonight
about retiring from human society, and in the
doing of it, I want you to know
what I mean by society.
In the newspapers, society means people with mink
coats and whose names are in the social
register.
It is commonly called high society.
A society matron did so and so.
They often die as society matron did it.
That means high society.
But I am not talking about high society.
I'm talking about human society.
And human society is a name given to
the circle of people that we touch, whether
they be our own within our family, a
man and his wife, and child forming a
little circle of society.
And then all her relatives and all his
relatives, a bigger circle of society.
And then the friends of themselves and all
the relatives and the friends of the relatives,
they form a bigger circle.
And then there are lodges where men touch
each other and in baseball games and hunting
parties and golf tournaments and even where we
work and even when we're shopping.
We're facing human society.
Wherever we go, wherever people are, that's society.
A group of human beings living together forms
a society, whether it's a man and wife
and his band or baby, or whether it
be a great crowd, a multitude as said
here of Jesus.
Now that's what I mean by society.
And the whole philosophy of society, God and
man and society, is wrapped up in this
thing that Jesus did.
When Jesus came and went by himself alone,
the whole thing rooted back down into the
fact that human society is what it is,
and God is what he is, and man
is what he is.
Now let's look at this about human society.
And I say this knowing that you are
evangelical Christians, but some places I would have
to make a case for this and argue
it, and then I would be argued down.
Human society is loss.
Now I hold in my hand a bible
composed of 66 inspired books, and the burden
of that whole bible is that human society
is loss.
And by loss I mean that its legal
position is to be under divine sentence.
Human society is under divine sentence.
I just read an article while I had
a sandwich after I came back from a
discipline where I preached, where I came up
here tonight, and I read there an article
about the church, all the churches of the
United States getting together, all Protestantism uniting.
And they were talking about what it could
be that could get us together, how we
could get together in the long discussion.
But they gave a little illustration that I
thought was well worthy of repeating.
It said some church somewhere, some group of
people somewhere, that a motion was placed before
the house that the church members in that
denomination do not drink, and that they would
not receive anybody or allow anybody in the
church to drink hard liquor.
And one pastor whispers, if this motion carries,
I won't have a man on my board.
Not a man on his board.
He'd better have had no board.
But anyway, human society, my friends, is a
group of people, and that they are lost,
that they are under divine sentence.
Now, the churches don't believe that now.
It is mostly they don't believe it now,
but that is what the Bible teaches.
And churches where all the board members drink,
naturally don't accept anything like this.
But it is true that the Bible does
teach that human society is under divine sentence,
and that its moral condition is described as
walking according to the print of the power
of the air, and hating and being hated,
and deceiving and being deceived, full of sin
all the time.
That's the moral condition of society.
And the spiritual condition of society is cut
off from the life of God.
Now, let's get that first of all.
I've preached too many times tonight to have
a good baritone voice, Brother Sheldon, but I'll
do my best with what I've got, about
what you do bureaucracy.
Now, let's get this straight, that human society,
according to the Bible, is lost.
It is under judicial sentence from God, and
it is cut off from the life of
God, and it is morally corrupt.
Now, that's human society.
Not one segment of human society, but human
society.
And the next thing is that that society
exercises over each of its members a strange
and terrible fascination.
That it exercises a powerful molding influence, and
a magnetic attraction, and an irresistible compulsion by
its power of suggestion and example.
Now, society, organized society, exercises over the individual
this magnetic attraction.
It's a strange thing, and it's a beautiful
thing in some ways, how the individual is
influenced by his circle, and by the people
that he knows, and the people that touch
him, and the people he reads about, even
in history.
Human society exercises, I repeat, a magnetic attraction
over each individual member.
Do we still have water, Brother?
If you give me a glass of water,
I believe I'll make it.
God put the water in the hills, and
some good brother piped it into a building
that might just as well use it.
Now, how is God going to save a
man, the individual man?
How can he save the individual man when
society is lost, and society exercises over that
individual man an influence so powerful that it
molds him from the time he's born until
he dies, that it attracts him, that it
overwhelms him?
It has a magnetic attraction upon him.
It hypnotizes him.
It holds him in thrall.
How is God going to save a man
from a ship that's going down?
How is he going to rescue the individual
when the individual is a part of a
larger whole, and that larger whole controls the
individual, and that larger whole is lost, perishing,
under sentence, cut off from the life of
God, full of iniquity, destined for final condemnation?
And yet, in that mass, God has a
few men.
In society, God has a few individuals.
And he wants to save those individuals.
He wants to save them.
How is he going to get them off
of that sinking ship?
How is he going to disengage them from
the attraction of society?
How is he going to deliver them from
the thrall of society?
How is he going to break the stranglehold
of society upon them?
No, he's going to deliver them from society.
And what do I mean by saved from
society?
I'll explain what I do not mean personally.
By saved from society, I don't mean saved
from the society of mankind.
Some have so interpreted this.
They have properly and rightly seen that God
must save men from fallen society to save
them at all.
And they've interpreted it to mean that we
are to withdraw from society altogether.
So we have hermits, and the poets have
talked about the Eremites.
And Eremite is just another name for a
hermit.
Very beautiful poetic name.
And they have gone off by themselves and
lived alone and gotten old and gray and
moldy and usually bitter, in the woods somewhere,
withdrawing from human society altogether.
Now that's exactly what I don't mean.
And that's exactly what the Bible does not
mean.
For the Bible is a wonderfully social book.
If you read your Bible, you will find
it's a social book.
You will find that people lived together in
that Bible.
They touched each other in that Bible.
They loved each other.
They were together there in that Bible.
And in the Old Testament, they worshiped God
together, and they lived together, and they loved
together, and they died together.
And in the New Testament, they were together
when the Holy Ghost came.
The Bible is a social book.
And old Saint Bernard, or Bernard or Clooney
it was, who wrote this celestial city, when
he said of Jerusalem the golden, I know
not why, know not what social joys are
there, but radiancy of glory, what joy is
beyond compare, he was recognizing the fact that
we are made for each other, and that
we are not right when we are alone,
that we are incomplete when we are alone,
that God made us for each other.
And a lone man is not quite normal.
A man who is by himself or all
the time alone is not quite normal.
He needs society, and society needs the individual.
And the Bible is a social book.
It is a book of fellowship.
And the very word fellowship means the condition
of being fellows, equals with people.
So the Bible is not the book of
the hermit.
It is not the book of the monk
who begs from door to door with his
little rice bowl in his hand and his
shoes off his feet.
No, the Bible is a social book.
It's a book of living together.
But the trick is now, as I repeat,
if society is lost under the judicial sentence
of God, without life and without hope in
the world, and God wants to save members
of society for himself, how is he going
to save a man from society and break
the stranglehold of society upon him?
I say, it is not by having that
man desert human society and become a monk.
How then is he going to do it?
He's going to do it by taking them
not from society, but taking, breaking the power
of society upon them.
Now, the attraction of society has to be
neutralized on the individual.
That magnetism has to be broken.
He's going to have to somehow break the
power of gravity that holds the man's heart
to the mass.
He's going somehow to need to break the
invisible cords that binds that man.
He's going to have to take away from
the neck of that man the fingers that
are strangling him and shake him loose from
society so that his power over him is
broken.
It is not by retreat from human society,
but victory in human society that the Bible
teaches for its Christians.
The influence must be counteracted and the power
must be destroyed.
How is that accomplished?
Now we get back around to the text
again.
We read that Jesus went up into a
mountain himself alone.
He sent the multitude away and went up
into a mountain himself alone.
My brethren, we get it now and begin
to see the light.
That God saved men from society by breaking
the power of society upon them.
Fallen society, lost society, society under divine sentence.
Sinful society, break its attractiveness, lose its stranglehold,
turn the individual man free.
How can he do that and keep doing
that?
How can a man maintain that kind of
an attitude in a world like this?
How can he walk in the world and
not be of the world?
How can he mingle with society and not
be attracted by and strangled by society?
How can he be a free man and
a saved man in a society that's going
down?
The answer is simply by retiring frequently from
society.
Not by retreating from human society, but breaking
the power of society over the man by
retiring frequently from society.
Why does a man retire from society?
Why does the Bible teach all the way
through?
And why does the echo sound all down
the corridors of the centuries?
The saints always had their lonely times.
The great Christians always had their times when
it could be said of them, himself alone.
The answer is, they were obeying God.
And they were alone not to retreat from
reality, but to retire from society and commune
with God.
I hold in my hand an imaginary little
affair, maybe it's the shape of a cross.
And it's entirely dead.
There's nothing to it, it's just there.
And I can see it because it's in
my hand there, as long as that lead
pencil has got a cross on it.
I see it, it's got a little mark,
we can hang it up, a little affair,
we can hang it up.
And it has no life in it, it's
just a dead thing.
I hold it in my hand.
Now the night is coming on.
And I know the night will come on
before many hours.
And yet I want that thing to be
separated from the night.
I want it to break the spell of
the darkness that will soon engulf it.
I want it to shine, I want it
to stand out clear in the night.
How do I do it?
I take it for an hour and put
it on the windowsill where the sun can
hit it.
The sun shines on it for an hour.
It is treated with some kind of chemical.
Then the sun, after shining a while on
that, you take that thing and put it,
hang it on the wall there, and then
let the night come.
Let the shadows deepen and the darkness descend.
Walk into the room and there shines your
little cross, bright and clear and cheerful on
the wall, though it before was but a
dead thing.
An hour in the sunlight prepared it for
a long night of shining.
You've seen those little crosses, you can buy
them at each company or anywhere where they
sell such things.
What do they have on them, brother?
Radium, some sort of thinned-down radium, I
suppose.
There they give off some kind of light.
After it has first absorbed it, it gives
it off.
It slowly wears out, and by the time
the morning light has come around again, the
poor little old cross is pretty thin out.
He doesn't have much left, but he's got
enough, had enough to shine through the night.
That's exactly, at least it's some kind of
an illustration.
Here we are in the midst of the
world and the darkness is round about us.
How can we break the power of the
darkness?
The answer is expose yourself sometimes to God.
Retire sometimes from human society and expose the
Godward side of your soul to the sunlight.
And the light of God will shine down
on you, and you will absorb God's ways,
God's thoughts, God's emotions, God's personality, the ways
of God.
And then when you're thrust back into the
darkness of society again to make your living,
you will shine with the reflected light of
borrowed glow.
There's the reason Jesus went into the mountains.
They surrounded him all day long.
They took a world of life and energy
out of the man, Christ Jesus.
Their bickering and their jealousy and their evil
talk and their just sheer worldliness took a
lot out of him.
He became tired.
What is he going to do?
Surrender to it all?
No.
He sent the multitudes away and it came
to pass that he went up into a
mountain himself alone.
He turned the Godward side of his soul
up toward heaven, and for a long time
exposed his soul to the face of God.
And when that sweet and precious hour was
over, he came down the mountain again to
still the waves and to bless mankind and
to help the multitude.
But he couldn't help the multitude.
He had to help the multitude by retiring
and getting power, so that when he came
among them he had what they needed.
Why do we retire frequently from society?
I have said to commune with God, and
I say also to bathe our soul in
silence.
I've said it before, all together to noise
your world.
People are children.
They love noise.
A little girl came home, they tell me,
from a party, and her mother said, Honey,
did you have a good time?
She said, Mother, did we?
She said, We got to laughing and then
we got to screaming.
And she said, We just, all twelve of
us, screamed and screamed and screamed.
She said, I've never had such a good
time.
And they don't when they're five or six.
Get out on the highway and see these
boys with the hot rods.
They go roaring away, I said to the
driver.
That fellow's under thirty.
He's under thirty.
If he's over thirty, he'd never have opened
that thing like that.
He's under thirty.
There's something about childhood and immaturity that likes
noise.
But maturity wants less of it.
And old age doesn't want none.
It don't like it.
And so in our moral life, in our
religious life, in our philosophical life, in our
social life, the more immature we are, the
more we've got to cheer ourselves by just
screaming and screaming what a time we have.
And you know we've got that kind of
religion in the world today.
A lot of the so-called evangelicalism is
simply the religion of the little girls who
scream.
The louder we yell, the more noise we
make, the more we advertise, the more bells
we jingle, and the more songs we play,
and the more talk we do, the happier
we are because there's immaturity.
But the mature saint finds that sometimes he
has to recharge his batteries in the silence.
Old Moses, he was learned in all of
the learning of the Egyptians, but when God
wanted to use him to deliver the children
of Israel, he had to give him another
degree.
And it took him forty years to get
it.
In the backside of the desert, in the
silence, oftentimes for a long period, the only
sound you would hear would be the muffled
munching of the sheep as they munched their
cudgels, lying there in the darkness under the
stars.
God put Moses to school to this silence.
He said, Moses, you've been at court where
everybody talks.
You've got to learn the therapeutic value of
silence.
You've got to get alone.
And so Moses learned it, and learned it
well in the silence.
And when our Lord came, when it would
get too much for his human heart to
endure any longer, he said, all right, you
go your way.
And he disappeared.
They looked everywhere for him, couldn't find him.
Didn't know which rock to look behind.
Didn't know which tree he might be kneeling
beside.
He was bathing his heart in the silence.
Hear that?
It's that that's astounding the human race.
It's that that's sending men to premature graves
with nerve breaks and heart failures.
It's noise and tension and pressure and squeeze.
You can't escape it.
How can you escape it?
We're living in the middle of it.
You can't all go to Arizona.
If we all did, Arizona would be as
noisy as Chicago.
How are you going to do it?
The answer is you can't retreat from it,
but you can retire from it.
You can get alone and break, break the
pressure and squeeze and push human society and
wait on God.
Oh, I don't know whether I'm wasting this.
I don't suppose I am.
I know some of you are hearing me.
My friends, you'll learn more in the silence
than you will listening to me preach.
You'll learn more in retirement with your God
than you'll ever learn in all the Bible
schools on the continent.
You'll learn more as you bathe your soul
in silence and turn your faith up to
the light of God in retirement.
And this may sound very strange to you,
because this is usually preached in fundamental circles
too much.
There is such a thing as holding familiar
fellowship with the powers of the world to
come.
I don't know that I know what that
means.
I'm preaching about something that I can't define.
I often do.
And I don't know whether I can define
the powers of the world to come or
not.
But it has been the belief of all
religious people and all Bible people that there
is another world just above the world where
we live.
If not above geographically or astronomically, then above
in quality of life, that kingdom of God.
And all through the Old Testament there walked
wonderful creatures.
The angel came to Abraham, three of them,
and strange beings came to get him when
he was threshing and to Samson's mother when
she was in the field.
And she dashed home to tell her husband,
come back and see this wonderful man.
They made a sacrifice.
He leaped into the middle of the fire
and disappeared into the fire.
Were they crazy?
Were they insane people?
Were they fanatic?
No.
They were normal sane people and their future
and subsequent living proved that they were.
They had gotten in touch with another.
They'd heard another voice and seen another vision
and communed with the powers of the world
to come.
I've never had a vision in my life
and I've never dreamed a dream that I
ever amounted to anything.
I've dreamed some weird ones in my day
and I have dreamed some beautiful and some
terrible ones too.
But I never believed any of them amounted
to anything.
I'm not a visionary nor a dreamer.
Maybe not enough so.
But I believe that we are not alone
in this world.
And I believe that God has not deserted
the earth.
And I believe that his messengers, flaming spirits,
are in this earth.
For he tells us the little child has
its guardian angel.
Jesus said God would have sent twelve legions
of angels.
An angel did come to comfort him while
he prayed.
The angel came to Peter and tapped him
on the shoulder and said get up.
And let him out and turned him loose.
Come into the book of Revelation and you'll
walk into a wonderful wonder world of living
creatures.
Throw back the blinds and look into heaven
and you see beasts and living creatures and
elders and angels flying in the midst of
heaven.
Now is that all nonsense?
Are we all to shrug that off and
smile a superior, supercilious smile and say that
belongs to the childhood of the race?
No, we dare not.
Jesus our Lord was announced by an angel.
The angel of the annunciation he is so
magnificently called in history.
The angel of the annunciation.
When he had died and was in the
tomb, the angels were there to say he's
not here, he's risen.
Now if you're getting frightened I'll tell you
I never saw an angel either.
I don't believe in seeing angels, that is
I couldn't see an angel in these old
2020s.
I can't possibly and there are 2020s through
the spectrum.
I couldn't see an angel that way and
I wouldn't think I'd quite care to hear
an angel either.
But you can't sell short the universal testimony
of the holiest saints of the age.
And you can't, you dare not deny the
teachings of the Bible that there's another world
impending upon this world and the doors swing
open both ways.
Jacob saw them go up and come down
and go up and come down.
Somebody called attention they went up before they
came down.
Strangely they must have been down there with
Jacob all the time and he didn't know
it.
They were ascending and descending.
They didn't come down and go up, they
went up and came down.
They'd been down.
Now why do we retire from society sometimes
into the secret silence to wait on God
and turn our hearts up to his sunshine?
I've told you two things, I tell you
now this third one, that we might commune
with or at least know the powers of
the world to come.
I have knelt in my study and in
the various little places where they put me
when I preach in these conventions here and
there, in hotel rooms, I have knelt with
my Bible open and shut out every noise,
locked my door and waited.
And soon you begin to have a feeling,
a sense, not a feeling, not an emotion
at all, you're as calm as a new
day in June.
There is a sense of absolute well-being,
a sense of complete harmony with the universe,
a sense of being where God is, a
refreshing, healing, delightful sense that can only come.
Of being in tune with God and retiring
from the crèche of society to let God
speak to your heart.
Isn't anything God says, I couldn't quote what
God said, isn't anything you see because you
couldn't paint what you see, it's beyond that.
It's deep, deep in the heart.
So Jesus escaped the toils and magnetic strangling
influence of society by retiring from it sometimes,
calming himself and collecting himself, and warming his
fire at the heat of it, and calming
himself in the stillness.
And you and I must do the same
thing.
This is 18th century preaching, worse than that
17th century preaching, better than that first century
preaching, better than that.
David's message, and Moses, and Abraham, and Job,
and Jacob, and Enoch, and the rest of
them, they all had to learn it better.
And the reason we're such shallow Christians, and
backslide so easily, and get discouraged so soon,
we live on the surface and in the
noise, meditation on the great solemn truths of
God, feed the heart and strengthen it.
Usually it can't be done except himself alone.
Now a word about the current usage, social
ideas.
The teaching now is almost everywhere, simply this,
that each individual in the society must seek
two things, get these two things, social integration
and social adjustment.
Hear those two phrases.
They sound so learned that they must be
so, but they're not.
Social integration.
Now what does that mean?
You hear that every place.
We should seek social integration.
We should bring our children up so they're
integrated socially.
Social integration simply means this.
It means that we are submerged in society
completely.
Social integration.
You pour a cup of water into a
tub of water, and there is achieved immediate
integration.
You go back and say, your mother says,
honey go back and get that water.
You go back, how are you going to
find it?
It's mixed now, it's gone with all the
rest of the water.
It's integrated.
Once was a lonely cup of water, now
it's integrated in a larger society.
So they're saying, social integration, get submerged, lost
in society.
They want me to study, to submerge myself
in a society that's already lost, to lose
myself in a lost society.
It's like telling me to chain myself to
the deck of a sinking ship.
Social integration.
Everybody's yelling about that now.
And the other one is social adjustment.
Teacher says, oh she's a well-adjusted child.
I don't think she's properly adjusted.
What's the matter with you?
Are you not adjusted?
Somebody gets a heebie-jeebies a little, and
they run off to a psychiatrist, and he
says, why the trouble, you madam, is you're
not adjusted now.
We sit down and we talk.
You've got to get adjusted.
Always tinkering with their infernal little screwdrivers, wanting
to adjust us.
Brethren, the Bible doesn't teach adjustment and integration.
It teaches detachment and repudiation.
A nurse is sent to a leper colony,
and the only way she can be any
use to that leper colony is be completely
detached from it.
The moment she gets adjusted to leprosy, she's
got leprosy.
And the moment she gets integrated in leprous
society, she's got leprosy.
Pretty soon she'll have no fingers either.
She can only serve a leprous society by
detachment from the leprous society.
So the Christian is one who has been
saved from a lost society.
And then somebody says, get integrated back into
that society.
And I answer, excuse me sir, but I
shall not.
I had a tough enough time in repentance
and tears and the seeking of the face
of God.
I had a tough enough time to get
converted and saved and renewed, regenerated.
And I have a tough enough time keeping
that very society from sucking me down.
So instead of getting integrated into it, I
want to retire frequently from it and be
there with God alone.
Then when I come back to it, I
can bless it.
Then when I come back to it, I
have something for it.
Then I can help a poor lost society
because I've come down from the high place
and I've got something to tell society.
But if I surrender to them and I
let them beat me down and frighten me
and intimidate me and absorb me, I have
nothing for them at all.
I come as bad as they are, leprous
as they are.
How can I bind a leper's sores when
I need somebody to bind my sores?
How can I bring hope to hopeless men
when I've got a hopeless heart beating in
my bosom?
How can I calm men when I'm all
excited myself?
Go into the silence.
Retire into thy closet, and when thou hast
shut the door, pray unto thy Father which
seeth in secret, and thy Father which seeth
in secret shall reward thee openly.
Then in calmness and assurance you come down
from the high place and into the dark
valley where men frightened and sick are everywhere
trying to get integrated.
You say to them, boy you don't want
to seek integration, you want to seek repudiation.
Say no to this society instead of yes.
Live in that everlasting no I won't.
And then turn to God and say an
everlasting yes.
In the same lips that utter an everlasting
yes to God must I utter an everlasting
no to society.
So it's detachment and repudiation.
Detachment from the harmless parts of society and
repudiation of the harmful ones.
For there are some things that are not
harmful in society.
It's lost society, but there are some things
that are not harmful.
We work, we buy, we sell, we marry,
we give in marriage, we mingle with men,
not harmful.
We visit the beautiful spots and see the
great scenery, that's not harmful.
We read the great books, hear the great
music, not harmful.
You don't have to give up Beethoven if
you love great music.
You don't have to give up Milton or
Shakespeare or Dickens if you love great literature.
You don't have to give up the great
masters if you love great art.
There are some harmless things in society.
You say how do you treat them?
Detachment.
Appreciate them but never let them get you.
Never let them get you.
They detach.
Love them, appreciate them, admire them, and then
turn your back and raise your affections to
the heaven above where Christ is at the
right hand of God.
Get all you can out of them for
you, but never let them master you.
Detachment is the word.
Then there are the harmful and evil parts
of society.
The drinking, the gambling, the rousing, carousing, repudiate
that.
And all that is dark and evil and
low, repudiate it.
Say an everlasting no to it.
And when you do and believe in Jesus
Christ, conversion takes place.
And your heart is converted and you're born
again.
And you become a new creature in Christ
Jesus.
And old things pass away and all things
become new.
But still you have the magnetic power of
society all around about you.
So while you live on the earth and
follow your Savior, it'll be necessary.
You can frequently retire from society in order
that you might break its stranglehold on your
life, in order that you might destroy its
power over you.
And when you come back to it, you
come back as the master, not as the
slave.
You come back as the physician to the
leper colony, not as another leper in the
colony.
Now, let me make myself clear.
I told you this morning, those of you
who are here, that I thought of what
I was going to say tonight.
I haven't a thing to say about the
quality of the sermon.
I've quit worrying about the kind of sermons
I preach.
Let young fellows worry about that.
But I just want to get it across
to you.
The point is, my Savior and yours, all
the old Bible worthies, and the saints down
the centuries, have all had that strange habit
of suddenly saying goodbye to the most youths
and getting along with God.
Staying there long periods of time.
Why?
The answer is, that they might break the
stranglehold of a lost society over their individual
being.
You will have to do it if you
make good as a Christian.
You will have to do it.
All by yourself.
Himself alone.
Good text to remember.
Himself alone.
And the next morning, or that same night,
toward the morning, he was down with them,
filling the way, blessing them.
But he never would have had the calm,
self-assurance that he had, if he had
not been himself alone.
Now, I wish I had a pill here.
I wish I had as many as we
have congregation.
Not very many out tonight.
But I wish I had little capsules here,
and I'd say, now, dear friends, it gives
me great pleasure.
I've got a capsule here, and here I'll
let you use my water.
Get the stick to get it down.
Each one of you that'll take this marvelous
capsule, you'll have no further trouble.
You'll be spiritual, you'll be blessed, you'll be
wonderful, and you'll be as happy as can
be.
I've all passed by, filing down this aisle,
left the other.
I'd love to be able to do that,
but I haven't any such capsule.
Not only that, nobody else has.
Not only that, they never have been invented.
God never sent any down.
He says, repent, you individual, of your past
sin.
Believe on Jesus Christ, and then learn.
Get retired sometimes from all human society, including
your family.
Retire.
Shut that door.
There alone with God, you'll grow in greatness.
You'll get wiser than Solomon.
You'll get as calm as a noon day,
while the world screams and howls and rattles
and blows its terrible whistles around about you.
And when you've had your soul blessed, you
can come back down where the poor, tired,
noisy world is, whistling past its graveyards, talk
to them about something worthwhile.
You see what I mean?
You can't be spiritual by learning a certain
rule, and you can't be spiritual by taking
a certain pill.
You can only be spiritual by cultivating spirituality
and sleep to follow.
I think you will.
I believe the Lord will make them sleepy
long enough for you to get an hour
with him.
I don't know how, but I believe it
can be done.
And I believe, I don't believe there's a
man around here so busy, but what God
will fix it so you can get some
time by yourself, if you want to take
it.
Suppose, for instance, that you spent with God
the time you now spend with newspapers and
magazines.
What do you suppose the result would be
in your life shortly?
I think it'd be a tremendous change for
the better.
You do have time to read the newspapers.
You do have time to listen to the
radio, look at television.
Do you have time for God?
Well, suppose that we ask God to help
us tonight.
I wonder how you feel about it.
Have I preached all around Robin Hood's famous
proverbial barn, or have I made myself clear?
Are there those that say, this interests me?
I see the real reason of this.
I believe I've lost out in the past,
because I want to rearrange my schedule so
that I can retire sometime from the precious
society for a little time with God.
Of cultivating spiritual things and calming my heart
and listening to God speak in the silence.
You'd like us to have prayer and closing,
that the Lord will begin providentially to work
things out for you, so you can get
that time.
I don't say how frequently, I don't say
how long.
I just say something like this has to
be done if you're going to make good,
if you're going to break the magnetic attraction
of society upon your poor heart.
You say, pray for me.
I'm interested, and I have some little measure
of what you're talking about.
I know, but I don't know much, and
I want to practice this seriously.
You raise your hand, so I'll see you,
and you're going to pray.
You're going to say, oh, there's so many,
I won't attend.
Count them.
We're just going to pray.
Oh God, oh God, now know it.
The world is full of tribulations.